


wear a raincoat or it'll soak you to the bone

by mercuryhatter



Series: delano-shelley jailbreak series [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eye Trauma, Fix-It of Sorts, Found Family, Gaslighting, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Manipulation, Nightmares, Pre-Canon, Recovery, Trans Characters, Transphobia, web influence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:07:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24708067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuryhatter/pseuds/mercuryhatter
Summary: When Eric leaves the Institute, Michael eventually follows.Heed the warning tags, but none of them are described graphically or in depth except perhaps canon-typical Jonames nastiness.
Relationships: Eric Delano & Michael Shelley, Eric Delano/Original Character(s)
Series: delano-shelley jailbreak series [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1843318
Comments: 7
Kudos: 93





	wear a raincoat or it'll soak you to the bone

**Author's Note:**

> See end notes for notes on the timeline I chose to go with for this fic as well as some info on the research I did into British trans men in the 1980s. Title is from Welly Boots by The Amazing Devil, which I invite you to listen to while thinking about canon Eric and Gerry and cry.

Michael lay on the floor, face striped in varicolor warmth with the sun streaming through the window. Rhia had covered it in a plastic sheet from the store, one that made it look like flowers done up in stained glass. He told Michael that it filled the room with color like the inside of a prism, and Michael held the imagined tableau inside his mind. Eric sometimes teased Rhia for his descriptions of things, said the poet in him kept slipping out, but Michael almost preferred his words to the visuals themselves. 

Michael reached a hand over to Gerry, who was sucking his thumb solemnly and fussing with the pages of a board book with his other hand. He was a quiet, watchful baby, who slept more than he cried, but could be sent into hysterical giggles with the barest effort at a funny face. Eric had cut his hair short after he was born, to avoid Gerry’s curious, grasping fists, but Michael kept his long, and was forever tugging its twists away from him. 

“Someday,” Michael told him, tugging on his own hair for the calming texture of it between his fingers, “you’ll have your own hair to tug on, and then what will I do?”

“It’ll be a long time still,” Eric said from the door. Michael could hear the smile in his voice, conjured up the feeling of Gerry’s soft bald head under his palm. Ten months old and he still barely had more fuzz than a peach. 

“It’ll come,” Michael said. Gerry’s tiny fist curled around one of Michael’s fingers, and he smiled.

\--

“Why would I want to quit?” Michael said, a few faint syllables of his high, nervous laugh strung along behind the words. His hands, always restless, drummed faintly on the edge of his desk as he watched Eric. “Where else am I going to go?” _Where else is going to help me get hormones? Where else is going to let me work without ID? Where else would ever hire me in the first place?_

Michael did not say these things to Eric Delano, who closed his wide and pleading eyes and leaned back against the library bookshelf with a sigh. His face creased with something violent for a moment-- anger? fear? Desperation?-- but as fast as the expression took hold, it was gone, and Michael shrugged it off. He had such an active imagination, after all, and was doing his best to do as Emma advised and stop reading so much into people’s reactions. 

“No, no, you’re right, of course. Why would anyone want to leave?” Eric said. “Unparalleled job security, this.” He slammed the book he was reshelving back into its place a little too hard and Michael jumped at the sound, prompting an apologetic look from Eric. “Sorry, Michael, sorry. I’ve just-- got a bit of a headache. Don’t mind me.” 

“I’ll make some tea when we go back downstairs,” Michael said, relieved to have a problem he knew how to address, and Eric’s answering smile was feathered at the edges with barely perceptible cracks. 

\--

“And how are you finding the position, _Mr._ Shelley?” James Wright asked, with a casual smile over his folded hands. Michael returned the smile, subtly shifting his position to sit on a restless hand. The way Wright said his name always made his skin prickle, somehow always carrying in the sound of it the knowledge that Wright _knew_ it wasn’t his real name, not in any way that counted to anyone but Michael, and that Wright could do whatever he pleased with that information at any time.

But of course he wouldn’t-- Wright might make Michael a little nervous, but it was just because Wright was his boss. He was the one who connected Michael with the endocrinologist who accepted cash payments, the one who referred him to a surgeon who would do his mastectomy and gave him the time off to recover from it. Michael was safe with him. He needed to stop assuming the worst of people so often. 

“It’s going great,” Michael chirped, suppressing his wince when his voice cracked and Wright’s smile broadened very slightly. Indulgent, like Michael was a faintly amusing child. Well, Michael shouldn’t begrudge him that-- he _was_ very young, and Wright put up with far more from him than he deserved. “Emma’s really been teaching me a lot. I-- I’m not sure Ms. Robinson likes me very much, but I’m doing my best.” 

“I’m sure you are,” Wright said smoothly. “And don’t worry about Ms. Robinson. She won’t mind you as long as you do your job. I advise remaining on good terms with Ms. Harvey.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “I’m fairly sure she’s the only one Ms. Robinson likes.” Michael tittered anxiously and shifted on his trapped hand. 

“You’re doing a perfectly satisfactory job, Mr. Shelley. You may go,” Wright said, signing Michael’s evaluation with a flourish and sliding it into a drawer. 

Back in the archives, Michael invented some half-needed reorganization task for himself and used it to spend the rest of the day in the furthest corner of document storage. He barely registered the labels on the folders he was stacking, feeling only guilt for the nameless fear he felt turning in his chest with each heartbeat. 

\-- 

“I knew there were others, but I-- I don’t know, I just assumed-- I never thought I would--” be _allowed_ , was how that sentence ended in Michael’s head, but he couldn’t complete it through the clawing tightness in his throat. Rhia’s arms around him were heavy and soothing. He was a big man, nearly eight inches shorter than Michael but carrying weight on his hips and chest with a confidence that stunned Michael in his own perpetually folded-in posture, his battered-in aloneness. Rhia was a vibrant, breathing alternative to the way Michael had been living his life, and the hope he inspired in Michael was almost as choking as the guilt that he hadn’t thought of it on his own. 

But it was hard to indulge the guilt under the full force of Rhia’s smile, the easy welcome he constantly projected. His face said _we are allowed, we do belong_ , with such an unshakeable force that Michael couldn’t help to begin to believe it. 

\--

Michael had nightmares now that he was free of the Institute. Some of them were the same ones he’d had before the Institute, the ones that had left him alone while he worked there-- Ryan, in the dorm room Michael had spent less than a semester in, screaming while tendrils of the floor wriggled up and pierced his flesh; Michael, in the year after that, snatching sleep and jobs where he could until he stumbled upon the Institute and the old dreams faded into a calm, cobwebbed haze. Some were new: James Wright’s awful, affable smile, a cold blade scraping beneath Michael’s orbital bone. Less explicably: a mass of spiders, swarming down Michael’s throat and carrying away his screams. 

But when he woke the flat felt quiet, safe, and unwatched. In one room Eric and Rhia breathed in soft concert; in another, Gerry did, a tiny bright spark of life. In every corner of the small, beloved space breathed the word _family_ , more alive than Michael had ever known it. 

\--

It was a joke between Michael and Emma, how much Eric hated his job. How he acted out more and more violently at work, escalating from spilling tea in the break room with a pointed _oops_ to setting whole boxes of old files alight. Michael didn’t understand how he hadn’t been fired yet, understood less still what drove him to hate the job so much. He must know that it kept them all safe-- after all, he was still here. His erraticness scared Michael sometimes, but then Emma would glance at him like they were sharing a secret and laugh, and Michael’s fear slipped away when he smiled in return. He had almost forgotten the moment in the library six months ago when Eric had asked him about quitting, and Eric hadn’t asked him again, though Michael sometimes caught him staring at him too long. It made him nervous, and Michael tried his best to balance making him feel better-- bringing him tea, taking some of his work-- and getting drawn into his mess. 

It was nearly two years of walking that knife’s-edge before Eric was out sick for a day, and then a week, and then Emma, with that same secret-sharing smile, told Michael in low, gossipy tones that Eric had had some kind of breakdown and wouldn’t be coming back. 

The words “some kind of breakdown,” in that voyeur’s tone, felt like a tendril reaching out from the aftermath of Ryan’s death, those same words tittered from mouth to mouth in the dorms and lecture halls until they drove Michael out. Staring into Emma’s eyes, he felt a flare of anger, then fear, before those things smoothed out in him like so many things did, buried beneath soft cottonwool. 

“That’s sad,” he told Emma, and watched her wipe the glee of gossip from her eyes and replace it with sympathy. But that was uncharitable-- surely she had meant to be sympathetic the whole time. Emma was nice, understanding-- Michael was just projecting his past onto her, unfairly, again. He had to stop doing that.

“You’re right,” she said, patting Michael’s arm. “We’ll send him a card.” 

Michael went to visit Eric later, when he’d been released from the hospital. Rhia answered the door, regarding him first with suspicion when he said where he was coming from, and then with something less identifiable when Eric told him to let Michael in. 

“It’s that place,” Eric pleaded with Michael, bandaged eyes and hands tight around his. “This was the only way, Michael.” 

Paranoid. Delusional. Crazy. Michael had been here before. _Not safe,_ the cottonwool in his mind told him. _Get back to where it’s safe._ So he did, and he buried the false safety he’d seen in Eric and Rhia’s home, the tingle of recognition he felt looking at Rhia in particular. 

_Back to where it’s safe._ Where Ms. Robinson would tell him what to do and Emma would tell him how to feel and James Wright would loom over it all, letting him borrow security and ease as he needed. Something very deep in him stirred in protest as he left, but he could hardly feel it, twitching so far beneath the cottonwool. 

\--

The fire took away all Michael’s safety, all his security, burned through his protective layer of cottonwool and scorched the suddenly-exposed muscle of his heart. He heard Emma and Gertrude talking in hissed whispers about a lightless flame, but to Michael the light had been bright enough-- he still felt it scorching his eyes, smarting in the fingertips that he had thoughtlessly touched to the door of the store room it had taken. He felt the light in his brain like a migraine for days after, burning and scraping at nerves he didn’t even know he had to expose. It was as if he’d been struck dumb with smoke inhalation for years and now his lungs had been evacuated, clear but left out to dry on the embers. 

There wasn’t anywhere to hide. The light followed him wherever he went. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t find any comforting darkness behind his eyelids. He couldn’t be at the Institute under all the watching eyes. He felt flayed, and after a week away from work, he felt sick. 

But he also felt certain. More than anything else, he _felt_ , and until the fire Michael had not realized how long it had been since that had been true. 

Eric held his hand and talked Rhia through the procedure while Rhia wielded the knife. They kept him safe from the hospital, having a nurse friend of Rhia’s bring them stolen supplies, and under their care Michael healed faster than he expected, in more ways than one. 

\--

Eric didn’t discuss Mary very often. She had died in an accident, Michael gathered, shortly after giving birth to Gerry, sometime in Eric’s last few months at the Institute. But even before leaving he talked about Gerry as if he was the only good thing in the world, and on meeting him Michael had to agree. Of Michael, Eric, and Rhia, Michael was the lightest sleeper, and he was first up when Gerry cried in the night, singing him back to sleep. Gerry didn’t mind that his voice cracked and slipped out of tune, just twined his hand in one of Michael’s tight-wound curls and fell asleep that way. 

\--

The world was still full of evil books and the flames that consumed them and twists of fear and watching eyes and insidious cottonwool spiderthreads. But there was a corner of it where sunlight filtered warmly through bright plastic flowers, and joined hands kept new life safe. 

**Author's Note:**

> These events are set between roughly 1984 and 1987, with Michael starting at the Institute towards the beginning of this period and Gerry being born sometime in 1986. Eric successfully quits about eight months after Gerry is born. Michael starts at the Institute after his disastrous single semester of university; he is 18 at the time. Mary Keay got hit by a completely normal bus cuz I didn't want to deal with her ass. 
> 
> When 167 came out I spent some time (a LOT of time >:/) taking notes on the timeline and then I deleted my blog like an idiot and a fool and now it's gone BUT these are the relevant pieces for this particular fic lmfaoooo
> 
> I also read about trans men Mark Rees and Laurence Michael Dillon to get an idea what being trans was like in the UK in the 1980s and it's some interesting reading. HRT and surgeries, both top and bottom, were available as far back as the 1950s, but difficult to get. Additionally, legal recognition didn't come for trans people until much later, and continues to go back and forth on its accessibility. Therefore, some of the things that James Wright is able to hold over Michael are a) the fact that his legal documents don't match his name and gender, b) access to doctors who will give him affirming care under the table, and c) keeping him isolated from the trans community who could have helped him with these things, which did of course exist at the time. Meeting Rhia allows Michael to get access to community and resources without getting them through a soulless eyeball fuck; we love to see it. Anyway, I do want to note that I am trans but I've never been to the U.K. and don't understand much about being trans there other than what I've heard and read, so I didn't try to get too specific here. 
> 
> While you're reading this, maybe consider checking out U.K. based trans organizations such as Mermaids U.K. They could always use the support.


End file.
